Harvey · 1628
De Motu Cordis
In the autumn of 1628, at the press of William Fitzer in Frankfurt am Main, William Harvey, fifty years old, the physician to Charles I of England and the fellow of the College of Physicians of London, published a Latin octavo of seventy-two pages titled *Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus* (*Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals*). The publication had been deliberately set abroad to avoid the English ecclesiastical-licensing scrutiny that would have applied at the London presses. The book was about twenty thousand words. It demonstrated, by the combination of dissection-evidence, standing animal-vivisection observation of valves, standing quantitative-arithmetical estimate of the blood-volume the heart pumps per hour, and logical deduction, that the arterial and venous systems are a closed circulation driven by the pump of the heart, in which the same blood passes through the body about a thousand times a day. The classical Galenic doctrine of two separate systems (the venous system originating in the liver, the arterial system originating in the heart, the blood consumed at the tissues and continuously replaced from food) had been the operating model of European medicine for fourteen hundred years. Harvey's book overturned it. The reception was slow (Harvey himself, by his later remark to John Aubrey of c.1650, had not in his lifetime had a single English-physician colleague accept the thesis in full); the acceptance was complete within forty years of Harvey's death.
It is twenty past nine on the evening of an unrecorded day in October 1628, in the study of William Harvey's house at Whitehall (the physician-in-ordinary residence allocated to him as the senior royal physician), in lamp-light through the west window. He is fifty years old. He is William Harvey, born at Folkestone in Kent on the first of April 1578, schooled at the King's School Canterbury and Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, took his MD at the University of Padua in 1602 under the anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius (whose standing 1603 demonstration of the valves in the veins is the crucial empirical foundation on which Harvey's thesis would build), in his eighth year as Physician Extraordinary to Charles I.
On the desk in front of him is the finished manuscript of the Latin treatise, sixty-eight folio sheets in his own hand, dedicated to the King Charles and to Dr Argent, the President of the College of Physicians, both dedications composed in the late summer. The manuscript has been finished for about three weeks. The decision he is making this evening is the publishing-strategy question: whether to print at the Stationers' Company in London (where the ecclesiastical-licensing committee will hold the manuscript for at least six months and may, in the climate of the late-1620s Laudian church, refuse the licence on the innovation-in-natural-philosophy grounds), or to print at the William Fitzer press in Frankfurt am Main (where the imperial-Frankfurt-fair printing trade has, since the 1610s, been the principal outlet for the European-natural-philosophical literature on the post-Galileo continental model).
He thinks: Galileo's Dialogo will not appear from a Roman press in this decade. Galileo will go to a Florentine printer or a Leiden printer. The pattern of the seventeenth-century natural-philosophical book is that the decisive book goes to the continental press.
He thinks: the English market will read the book in Latin imported through the Frankfurt book-fair. The Latin readership of the country is about three thousand educated men. The English readership at this scale, by my later book De Generatione Animalium in 1651, will be about ten thousand. The Latin first edition is the serious-readership edition.
He thinks: the College of Physicians of London is going to be hostile. The College has, since the Lumleian lecture-series of 1616 in which I first delivered the circulation thesis, kept the internal politeness about the question and the private hostility about the colleague. The College will, on publication, debate me for a generation.
He thinks: the print-run at the Frankfurt press will be five hundred copies. The first edition will sell through in two years. The publishing question is settled.
He writes the covering letter to William Fitzer in Frankfurt that evening. The manuscript goes by the diplomatic post to Frankfurt in the first week of November. The book is set, printed and bound at the Frankfurt press in the winter of 1628–29 and is offered at the Frankfurt book-fair of the spring of 1629.
The reception of De Motu Cordis through the 1630s, 40s and 50s was, by every careful judgment of the history of medicine (Charles Singer, Henry Bynum, Roger French, Andrew Gregory), the slow displacement of the Galenic doctrine by the Harveian. Harvey himself, by John Aubrey's Brief Lives of c.1680, remarked to Aubrey in the late 1640s that he had not had a single English physician colleague of his seniority who had accepted the thesis in full in his lifetime, and that the colleagues younger than thirty had mostly accepted it, and the colleagues older than fifty had not. The acceptance was effectively complete by the 1660s; the Royal Society's founding programme of 1660 took the Harveian model as the standard physiological frame. Harvey's later work on the development of the chicken embryo (De Generatione Animalium, 1651) is the foundational text of modern embryology.
William Harvey died at his brother Eliab Harvey's house in Roehampton on the third of June 1657, seventy-nine years old. He is buried at the Harvey-family parish of Hempstead in Essex, in the chapel he had built for his nephew. The original 1628 Frankfurt first-edition copy that Harvey himself had owned (with the seven manuscript-marginal-corrections in his own hand for the 1635 second Frankfurt edition) is in the Library of the Royal College of Physicians in London. The 1628 first edition has been continuously in print, in every modern European language, for the nearly four hundred years since.